The Search for Significance in Ready Player One

Halliday (Mark Rylance) was the great brain behind OASIS. (Well, he and former partner Ogden Morrow, played by Simon Pegg). It took Halliday more than six days to do it, one assumes, but for the people of earth circa 2045, the extra time he took was worth it. Mid 21^st-century America has problems, man, and big ones. Hard ones. Hunger. Poverty. And a certain malaise of the soul. Better to slip into a virtual existence and test your mettle against a virtual game boss rather than deal with a real one breathing down your neck.

Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), who in OASIS is known as the avatar Parzival, tells us flat-out that everyone would rather spend their time in the fictional world of OASIS, and that Halliday himself was “like a god.”

But Halliday’s creation, like our own world, is a fallen thing. He never intended it to be an all-encompassing obsession. It veered from its original purpose and became something very different. You could say that OASIS fell because of its users’ own sinful natures: They loved it more than they ought and ate from the fruit. But instead of being punted from the garden of delights, they became trapped there.

It’s interesting that Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the movie’s main villain, was (in an echo of the Christian Satan) once part of team Halliday. He worked with the creator closely, though his critics say the only thing he learned from Halliday was what type of coffee he liked. Sorrento—smart, prideful and somehow totally clueless of what makes OASIS so special—clearly thinks OASIS was built to benefit its makers. Halliday built it, mostly, to benefit the people who use it. And so, we assume, he left Halliday’s light and became head of the nefarious IOI corporation. We can almost hear him quote Milton in his best corporate growl: “Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.”

When the movie opens, Halliday’s dead and Sorrento wants to officially claim this fallen world for his own. But Halliday—deadish though he may be—has another game in mind, one that perhaps can turn OASIS back to its original purpose.

Posthumously, Halliday tells OASIS’ countless inhabitants that he’s hidden the Easter egg of all Easter eggs in the virtual universe—his half-trillion-dollar fortune and keys to the kingdom itself: Those keys are, in a sense, literal ones (though, naturally, they’re virtual ones, too), one earned at the end of three separate challenges. All one has to do is piece together the clues, decipher the riddles, beat the challenges, claim the keys and …  unlock the secrets to the universe. The virtual one, of course.